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As we reflect on celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, we recognize that we wouldn't have made it here without the support of our members and patrons (that's you!). We’ve been asking people to share their Wex stories—what they were up to 25 years ago, their favorite Wexner Center moments, how the center has impacted them, what they see as the center's role in the community—and the responses have been rolling in.

Do you have a Wexner Center story? Share it here, and you just might see it featured here on our blog or in our print publications.

We were thrilled to attend the world premiere of STRAIGHT WHITE MEN at the Wexner Center, starring one of our favorite character actors, Austin Pendleton. More thrilling, however, was that we were two seats down from the playwright Young Jean Lee. She kept making notes, and at one point when the cast was singing a song, I looked over to her and she was mouthing the words along with them. You don't get that many cool opportunities in a lifetime. Thank you, Wexner Center.

Transfigurations was a record-breaking exhibition for us by all measures: more than 120,000 visitors (from 36 states and five countries), nearly 12,000 K–12 students guided through the galleries, and an ever-flowing line of tour groups. It was the signature moment of our 25th Anniversary Season, only made possible by an extraordinary gesture on the part of Leslie and Abigail Wexner to literally empty their home of remarkable treasures by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, and others in order to share them with the Columbus community and the world.

Friday, February 27, and Saturday February 28, cellist and composer Erik Friedlander returns to the Wex in American Power, a new collaboration with photographer Mitch Epstein that examines how we coexist with our diverse sources of energy and power. Performed live, Friedlander’s haunting score illuminates a series of images drawn from Epstein’s acclaimed volume American Power, whose focus Epstein says was “to photograph the relationship between American society and the American landscape, and energy was the linchpin.” These images include the pivotal photographs that first inspired this thematic series, which he took during a trip along the Ohio River Valley.

Together, Friedlander’s evocative music and Epstein’s images and anecdotes about the people and places he visited during his photo project avoid easy polemic, preferring to investigate notions of power, whether electrical or political.

Before American Power the performance was American Power the book. Epstein and Friedlander had history; they were friends and had previously worked together on a multimedia piece, and Epstein was familiar with Friedlander’s performance Block Ice & Propane, which combined his music with photography by his father, Lee Friedlander, and road movies from Bill Morrison. When he was awarded the 2011 Prix Pictet photography prize for his American Power photo project, Epstein invited Friedlander to collaborate with him for a presentation at the Les Rencontres d'Arles festival in France. From there, the two worked together on an album for American Power, and received a commission from the Walker Art Center to further develop a performance. The Wex is the second stop for that performance, which heads to London in June. You can get your tickets for the Wex performance here.

Below, the pair discuss their collaboration.

On adapting American Power

Mitch Epstein: I wanted to open up the project to be something larger. I…wanted to see what would happen if (Friedlander) got the pictures, responded to them musically, composed compositions....(the idea was to) create a conversation that could be the result of his music and my images and some storytelling that gave an entrance to the behind-the-scenes experience of making the work….Sometimes, what’s interesting when you’re an artist and you’ve made work and released it out into the world, is to get it out of the studio and see what happens, how does it interact with the environment? In this case it was how would another artist interact with it, what might he bring to it, and how might that alter the way in which I would go back and think about it in new ways.

Erik Friedlander: I opened up the pages (of the American Power book), and all of these incredible pictures, which told such a layered story, I felt like I could respond to them….I wrote about half a dozen pieces and I wrote them without thinking about a particular sequence of pictures—or without a particular picture at all—I just went after it, after the project as a composition project and let the pieces be strong on their own and then see where the chips may fall by then sending the compositions to Mitch and his team. They started sequencing pictures with them, and so we started this, Mitch always says, “conversation”—it’s a nice analogy....We worked together with the pictures and music and different sequences, and then I wrote more music—and I’ve even written some more music for this performance….What we did at d'Arles is kind of the bare bones of what you’ll see here, so the structure is strong, but it needed some presentational élan added to it. (Directors Annie B Parson and Paul Lazar) helped us flesh it out and make it “theatrical.”

ME: What was interesting was (to look for) a way to make it almost more operatic, to sort of deepen the conversation between music and pictures and voice/storytelling, but to do it in a way that would have a flow and meaning and do it in a way that would have a larger kind of resolved piece.

EF: Mitch's idea to bring me in was to kind of take it away from the normal, slideshow-and-photographer-talking-about-the-work. Annie B and Paul took it even further away from that. Where you were standing at a lectern, talking, now you're moving around, and we're working in this “studio.”

ME: We also worked with my collaborator and partner Susan Bell, who knew the project inside out because she lived through it as I was involved in it. And so she helped to develop the script and to, in a way, just distill some of the more important anecdotal passages. Also, a key passage was for it to illuminate the themes are hand, which are “what is our cultural relationship to energy, living in America post-9/11, the issues of security and surveillance”—but also our sort of long-developed relationship to land and to ownership. And how to do that in a way that wasn’t didactic, because my pictures are not didactic, they’re not prescriptive, they’re not one-dimensional in that way, and I think that’s where we worked hard to keep some of the mystery of it, because that’s what it is.”

The audience experience

EF: "I hope they're left with questions in their minds. As Mitch said, it's a little unsettling. It's not prescriptive, we don't say, “this is wrong, this is right, and this is what has to happen”—I mean, we're just kind of presenting the issues. I also think they should be left with kind of a feeling of what it's like to be an artist

ME: I think it’s as much about that as anything. It’s about going on a journey...you’re kind of invited in, and there’s a larger journey of, you know, how I came to this project and worked through it and then came out of it, but then it’s also the journey of how we shaped this thing itself, which is the result of our collaboration. So I think it’s very bold, and it’s very transparent and I think it’s taken on qualities that are more operatic in a way.

EF: And yet it’s kind of gentle and humble in a way.

The structure

ME: There was no kind of model to follow.

EF: That was kind of exciting.

ME: In a way, that’s always the most interesting thing. You really don’t have to sort of adhere to a certain genre and you can break through to things you hadn’t thought of before…. (American Power) has had an opportunity to grow, partly because we left it for a while and are coming back for it, and so we’ve had a chance to do other things and then see where we could still go further with it. That doesn’t always happen, you don’t always go back to something and even have enough interest to be motivated to do it, and yet the thing itself is larger than either one of us, or any single story or picture. It has its own life. Also for me, given that the project began in Ohio, it’s meaningful to sort of come full circle so many years later and see that the work holds a screen, holds a wall, and has become something very different than I ever would have imagined.

Young women ages 13–18 were invited to join us in February for WexLab: 10 GIRLS: Un-selfie Video with Liz Roberts, a one-day intensive video workshop. Participants spent the day in the Performance Space working together and separately to create this video compilation, making choices about how to depict themselves and voice their thoughts through video with video artist Roberts’s support. It’s great to see the range and depth!

Special thanks to our helper/volunteers Elizabeth, Caitlin, Sarah, and Rachel.

Then in March, five young women—and their teacher—from The Academy of Urban Scholars in Columbus joined us for a day-long WexLab: 5 GIRLS: Un-selfie Video, also with Roberts. Participants spent the day in the Performance Space working on the videos in this compilation, discussing careers in the arts, and talking about life in general, as well as how we make choices about how we depict ourselves (and why). The workshop also included pizza and tours of the exhibitions Hassan Hajjaj: My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume 1 and Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present.

Special thanks to our helper/volunteers for this session: Jean, Marisa, Elizabeth, Aubre, Dionne, and Andy.

As we reflect on celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, we recognize that we wouldn't have made it here without the support of our members and patrons (that's you!). We’ve been asking people to share their Wex stories—what they were up to 25 years ago, their favorite Wexner Center moments, how the center has impacted them, what they see as the center's role in the community—and the responses have been rolling in.

Do you have a Wexner Center story? Share it here, and you just might see it featured here on our blog or in our print publications.

I was born and raised on the west side of Columbus, right on the border of the Hilltop, and my memories of naturally taking to arts and creativity start at a very early age. I would stay in Mr. Hoffmaster's art class an extra period just so that I could draw a little bit longer. My parents always encouraged my creativity and did everything they could to enhance what seemed to come so naturally.

Aside from standard trips to COSI and other cool places, I have a very distinct memory of a trip to the Wexner Center in early 2000. It was some sort of special family day type event. There were all sorts of stations set up where you could paint, draw, construct stuff; it was awesome. There was one station where you were able to design your own picture frame. This was by far my favorite station. I put feathers, beads, paper machê, and pipe cleaners on my frame. I was most excited for the frame because I couldn't wait to get home and put a picture of my father's semi truck in it. My father had been driving semis since he was 19, and still does to this day. In my eyes my dad was a rockstar, so naturally, I was obsessed with big rigs my entire childhood; I would spend all day drawing semis.

My mom was recently cleaning out the basement and found the frame and picture in perfect condition. When I was looking at it, it made me realize how powerful of an impact not only my dad being a truck driver had on me, but that fact combined with how much my parents pushed me to be creative and chase my dreams. There's no doubt that my parents taking me to the Wexner Center and giving me authentic experiences like that helped shape me. It really started to dawn on me last year how heavy of an impact this all had on me, so I decided to travel with my dad in his semi for a few weeks this past summer and documented the trip with a 35mm camera. For me, this project was like everything from my childhood coming full circle—my parents encouraging my creativity while exposing me to all sorts of things that helped shape the way I see things.